Thread by @ezralevant

1. This is quite the standard to set. If accepting a $131 online donation from a racist -- who hid his full name; that was immediately returned by the MP when he found out -- is grounds to sack an MP, every single donation is a potential firing offence.

https://twitter.com/davidakin/status/1351315962272903169

2. O'Toole has been looking to purge Sloan from caucus from the beginning. That's undemocratic, but he should have had the courage to do so. This is so obviously an excuse to sack him without due process or reasonable cause. But worse than anything, it sets the new standard.

3. Right now, the Liberal war room is going through public databases looking for any donor they think they can make sound "offensive". They'll find dozens, all unknown to the Tories. And they'll dump them when they need to wobble O'Toole, or cover for a Trudeau gaffe.

4. But mainly: I'm just amazed at how easy to manipulate and knock off track the @CPC_HQ communications team is. Seriously: a single tweet, from a bad faith troll or activist, and it will consume their entire day. They are remarkably easy to provoke. And look at what they'll do!

5. Here’s a tweet from an anti-Catholic Liberal named @TOAdamVaughan. Not only did the @CPC_HQ war room (is there one?) ignore it, but when right wing Twitter raged against it, Liberal comms staff ignored it. They told Vaughan to delete it. But they didn’t give it any oxygen.

6. If the Liberals comms team were staffed by O’Toole’s people, they would have engaged with every right wing troll, had Trudeau himself apologize profusely, fired Vaughan and spent a week in self-denunciation. We’re now in Day 8 of O’Toole’s inferno.

7. You can only blame staffers for so much. This is on O’Toole. He’s cratering the party by choosing to talk about Liberal conspiracy theories about “right wingers”, instead of articulating any ideas of his own. Do you actually know what he stands for?

8. I read his emo Facebook post about abortion and gays and minorities and I thought: that feels like a clever message for the election of 2006 or 2011. Whoever wrote it is some party general wanting to re-fight the last war. Not a word of it was relevant to today’s crises.

9. I remember O’Toole talking about cancel culture — he mentioned it repeatedly in his leadership. Did he ever mean it? Was it just something someone told him to say? He just did it today with the passion of Stalin.

https://twitter.com/erinotoole/status/1280190966889091072

10. Every time O’Toole has a struggle session, read the replies — his opponents are not appeased or mollified or convinced. They are enthused and excited; they smell blood. They know what works on him. He’s picking up zero new supporters but losing them by the thousand.

11. If O’Toole ran on a platform of lockdown skepticism, free speech, ending cancel culture, standing up to China, lower immigration, fighting Big Tech monopolies & talking back to the media, he’d have a larger coalition than he has now, and he’d choose his own controversies.

12. I don’t know. It’s pretty sad. He’s about to hand Trudeau a majority. I think he actually might be worse than Andrew Scheer — something I never thought anyone could ever say.